by John Barth
And as to our real subject—the literary consequences of a place’s loss of its distinctive character to the “homogenization of American life”—I call it a non-problem for at least four reasons, while always acknowledging that anything might turn out to be a problem for some particular writer:
—First (a point I’ll expand upon in my later remarks on “The Place of Place in Fiction”), although many good writers revel and even more or less specialize in the realistic rendition of some particular locale, such rendition is not prerequisite to first-rate fiction. Ernest Hemingway declared that “every writer owes it to the place of his birth either to immortalize it or to destroy it”; I would add that he/ she may opt simply to ignore it, and to set her/his fiction in other real places, or in imagined or imaginary places, or nowhere in particular. I’m not recommending this, mind; only remarking it.
—Second, the loss of a place’s once-distinctive character, whether to cultural homogenization or simply to the passage of time, is what leads to the Literature of Nostalgia: a genre as rich as, and often overlapping, the Literature of Expatriation. Thus Faulkner, for example, whose Mississippi remained central to his imagination even after he himself shifted to exotic Virginia in his latter years, enjoyed contrasting the Old Yoknapatawpha with the New, where automobiles now zip down the streets “with a sound like tearing silk.” All grist for his mill.
—Third, the Homogenization of American Life and consequent attrition of place-identity can itself be a viable literary subject—as can anything, I daresay, in the hands of an appropriately inspired writer.
—And fourth, “homogenization” is always a matter of degree, and can cast what distinctiveness remains into higher relief than formerly. The film-director Jean Renoir observed that “the marvelous thing about [Hollywood] Westerns is that they are all the same movie. That gives a director unlimited freedom.”1 “Unlimited” is doubtless an exaggeration, but it’s a truism about any genre-art that its practitioners and fans become connoisseurs of small differences within the generic parameters. Against a background of the perceived homogenization of American life, the same might apply to non-generic art as well—as witness the title of Larry McMurtry’s recent essay-collection, Walter Benjamin at the Tasti-Freeze. A once-“wild” West that now has the usual constellation of strip developments and franchise businesses is admittedly less different from other places than it used to be; I submit, however, that a Tasti-Freeze in Archer, Texas, with a Larry McMurtry in it reading the late French literary critic and theoretician Walter Benjamin, remains a distinctive place indeed and (Q.E.D. by the book afore-cited) may be a fit subject for fiction, nonfiction, drama, or verse.
MIND YOU, I’M not arguing in favor of homogenization. But even biological clones are identical only genetically—and our DNA, as we all know, is by no means our whole story.
The Place of “Place” in Fiction1
JOHN O’HARA ONCE remarked that when he was between plots, all he had to do was take his imagination for a stroll down the streets of his native Pottstown, PA, remembering the families who lived in each house along the way, and soon enough he’d have the makings of his next story. One can scarcely imagine Flannery O’Connor’s muse in Ontario instead of Georgia, or William Faulkner’s singing sweetly of Down-East Maine. Fiction, whether narrative or dramatic, requires characters, action, theme, and setting, and for a great many writers of it—especially from the 18th century onward, with the ascendancy of the novel and the tradition of literary realism—setting becomes not only inseparable from those other components, but a virtual player itself, in numerous instances even a kind of authorial trademark: Thomas Hardy’s Wessex, Anne Tyler’s Baltimore.
This is so clearly the case that it’s worth remembering that the richly “textured” rendition of geographical locale is not prerequisite to great literary art. It was enough for Homer to invoke Odysseus’s Wine-Dark Sea and Rock-Bound Ithaca without going much beyond those formulaic epithets; we may get some pungent flavors of 14th-century Florence from Dante’s Divine Comedy or of 16th-century France from Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel, but it’s not from any Henry Jamesian “composition of place.” And in modern times, writers like Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett, Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, and Donald Barthelme achieved first-rate literary art that in many instances is all but placeless. Indeed, one does well to bear in mind Borges’s memorable objection2 that to be an “Argentine writer” one need not lay on the tangos and gauchos and pampas and such, any more than the author of the Koran felt obliged to load that sacred text with camels (Borges cites Edward Gibbon’s observation that there is no mention of camels in the holy book of Islam, and then speculates that had its author been an Arab nationalist, there would be caravans of camels on every page).
One might go even further and perpend some writerly cautions about the risks of too much dependence upon Place, especially upon any one particular place. Larry McMurtry, at an earlier stage of his career than the present, good-humoredly complained that critics had so often called him a “good minor regional novelist” that he’d had (or was going to have, I forget which) a T-shirt made for himself with that damningly qualified praise: a T-shirt that he has most certainly outgrown, if it ever fit him in the first place. And Joyce Carol Oates, speaking in my seminar room at Johns Hopkins to a group of apprentices from all over the map, warned that it can be perhaps all too easy to become the Sweet Singer of Saskatchewan, say, with an audience that may not extend beyond that doubtless songworthy place. The difference between a “good minor regional writer” and a Faulkner or a Joyce (Joyce Oates or Wordsworth or a Frost, for this distinction applies to poets as well as to fictionists) would seem to be the evocation of Place as an end in itself versus its evocation as locus and focus of the writer’s other and larger concerns. It no doubt has to do also with the strength, width, and depth of the writer’s powers other than “the composition of place.”
It’s worth noting too that writers very good indeed at the evocation of Place may not be associated with one particular locale: Of the likes of Hemingway, Steinbeck, Nabokov, Penelope Fitzgerald, Annie Proulx, and Robert Stone, one is tempted to say that they choose, from book to book, the locale that suits the project’s theme and action. More likely, I’d bet, the connection is coaxial, the place suggesting the theme as much as vice-versa—as is the case dramatically, so to speak, with Shakespeare’s “Italy of the heart” and Denmark of the soul in such plays as Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet: masterworks of whose settings the author had no firsthand experience at all.
THAT SAID, IT remains the case that Place assumes uppercasehood, for better or worse, more with writers like Eudora Welty, García Márquez, Flannery O’Connor, and Robert Frost, whose virtually entire oeuvre is inspired by or at least grows out of one general locale, than it does with writers who shift locations from project to project, or with writers like Jane Austen or Honoré de Balzac or Henry James or Marcel Proust, whose evocation of place is more social than geographical. Take Africa away from Hemingway or Italy from Henry James and you’ve still got a lot of Hemingway and James; take Mississippi away from Faulkner and you’ve got a Displaced Person.
A good many writers, of course, are somewhere between these polar examples: Their muse may return more or less frequently to some home base (Twain’s Mississippi River, John Updike’s small-town Pennsylvania), but also enjoy notable excursions from it (Twain’s Connecticut Yankee and Innocents Abroad, Updike’s Bech-books, his Brazil and medieval Denmark). It’s in this category that I locate myself: Tidewater Maryland, especially the Eastern Shore thereof, has been my muse’s boggy home turf for five decades, from my first published fiction to my latest. But if it is a place to which she much enjoys returning, that is at least in part because it is a place from which she has enjoyed considerable excursions: My first three books are set there, although Place is all but irrelevant to the second of those (The End of the Road). The next three are set mainly in Allegorica or Mythsville; most but not all of the ones
after that return to Tidewaterland.
Why? Not because it’s the only place that I know rather well: I housekept for a dozen years in central Pennsylvania, half a dozen in upstate New York, and two dozen in urban Baltimore, with shorter residences in Andalusia, Boston, and Los Angeles; my wife and I have traveled fairly extensively (by my lights, anyhow, though less extensively than my Mrs. wishes), and in recent years we’ve wintered on the Gulf Coast of Florida. In any case, one needn’t necessarily know a place widely or deeply in order to be literarily inspired by it; one need only apprehend some aspect of it sharply and then render that aspect into artful language. How profoundly did Vladimir Nabokov know the American west, into which he made only the occasional lepidop-teral foray? And yet his impressions of it in Lolita, however limited, are memorable indeed. On the coin’s other side, we note that massive knowledge of a place is no guarantee of its immortal rendition: Nobody did his homework more thoroughly than James Michener as his muse shuttled him from the South Pacific to Hawaii, Korea, Spain, Poland, the Chesapeake, Texas, and even Outer Space—but one may respectfully question the long-term staying power of those knowledgeable and enormously popular place-novels of his.
Myself, I take my inspiration where I find it, and that Where more often than not turns out to be the only geographical place to which I feel genuine, like-it-or-not Connection. That like-it-or-not, warts-and-all qualification can be important, as with pain-in-the-ass members of one’s family: It can safeguard one’s commitment from contamination by sentimentality. At its most extreme, one notes that it was Thomas Bernhard’s visceral disgust with aspects of his native Austria that largely fueled his novelistic imagination. My attachment to the region of my birth, upbringing, and re-residency—after a considerable and useful absence from it—is not an uncritical bond, but it’s a warm and strong one. To its choice as the setting for a novel or short story, however, I try to apply the same qualification-test that one ought to apply to one’s choice of characters, action, and every other component of the work: What’s its relevance to the fiction’s sense, the project’s theme? What’s it for?
The answers to such questions may not always be clear or pure to the author/asker; even hyper-self-conscious Postmodernists work by hunch and feel and habits of craft that have become second nature to them. But the questions ought always to be asked.
Liberal Education: The Tragic View
Commencement address delivered in 2002 to the graduating seniors of St. John’s College, Santa Fe (an institution noted for its Great Books curriculum), and subsequently published in the Albuquerque, NM, Tribune:
A COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS MUST always commence with a joke, even if the somber-sounding title of that address is “The Tragic View of Liberal Education.” As I happen not to have any appropriate jokes of my own, I’m going to borrow one from Bill Cosby, who gave the commencement address at Goucher College in Baltimore this time last year. It is a joke that, as Cosby warned his audience, contains one naughty word—and then he added, “At least it used to be a naughty word.”
It seems that a distinguished physicist and a distinguished philosopher happened to die at the same time, and approaching Heaven’s gate they were informed by the Gatekeeper that because of temporary overcrowding, God was admitting only those deserving souls who could ask Him a question that even He couldn’t answer; all others would have to wait in Limbo indefinitely. The physicist reflected for a moment and then posed the most intricate, difficult problem in quantum mechanical theory—which God solved on the spot. The philosopher then put the most elusive question in metaphysical/ontological /epistemological theory—to which God unhesitatingly gave an irrefutable answer. As the two great thinkers shook their heads in awe, an elderly couple humbly approached and whispered in the deity’s ear; He scratched His head, then shook it and promptly ushered them into Heaven.
“Excuse us, Sir,” the physicist and philosopher then respectfully inquired: “We can’t help wondering what in the world those folks asked that even You couldn’t answer.” To which God sighed and replied, “They asked me, When will our kids ever get their shit together?”
END OF JOKE (which anyhow I suspect applies less to graduates of this institution than to those of many others) and beginning of the Tragic View of Liberal Education. For me to natter on here about the importance of “Great Books” curricula like St. John’s would obviously be preaching to the choir—but I’ll do at least a paragraph-sworth of that anyhow, for reasons to be set forth presently. Having been born, raised, and schooled in the state of Maryland, and having subsequently lived and worked there for more of my life than not, I became acquainted early on with the program at your original campus in Annapolis. If I ended up matriculating at Johns Hopkins instead, that was because from high school I had gone up to Juilliard’s summer program to test against reality my then ambition to be a professional jazz drummer and orchestrator; I aced my courses but failed my reality-test with flying colors, came home to think what to do next, and found I had won a state scholarship to Hopkins that I’d more or less forgotten I’d applied for. So with a shrug of the shoulders I went there, faute de mieux—a most happy faute, as I came to realize later. In my undergraduate and graduate-school years there half a century ago, the St. John’s curriculum was spoken of and its pros and cons debated, or anyhow discussed now and then, in class and out; we compared and contrasted it with our own quite admirable two-year lecture courses in Literary Classics and Classics in the History of Thought—mandatory in those bygone days for all Hopkins Arts & Sciences undergrads.
What were those pros? What were the cons, as we saw them from the perspective of Baltimore back at mid-century?1
The pros, as I’ve said already, go without saying in this venue—or would so go except that 1) some of them are even more evident now than they were 50 years ago, and 2) saying over and over what goes without saying (at least vis-à-vis the craft of fiction-writing) was for decades my pedagogical specialty. So what’s to be said (once more, with feeling) for a curriculum devoted to the study of a more-or-less-agreed-upon roster of “the best that has been thought and said,” in Matthew Arnold’s famous formulation—or at least as representatively much of that Best as the ever-evolving consensus of a good college faculty believes can be fruitfully addressed between undergraduate matriculation and the baccalaureate?
Well: What’s to be said for it, needless to say, is that it not only edifies and instructs—any old good curriculum does that—but permits discourse within a shared frame of reference richer and more stable than this season’s pop music, films, and TV shows, which a colleague of mine used to lament were the only points of cultural reference that he could assume to be shared by his undergraduate students: not Homer and Sophocles and the Bible, not Virgil and Dante and Shakespeare, but The Sopranos and Friends and Britney Spears and N’Sync, all of which in just a few years will seem as quaintly dated and otherwise limited as Leave It to Beaver and Boy George and Tiny Tim (I don’t mean Charles Dickens’s Tiny Tim). It is this urge for a richer shared frame of reference that has prompted those “One City, One Book” programs that you may have heard about, in Seattle, Chicago, Buffalo, Rochester, and elsewhere: the urging by city officials that every adolescent and adult in town read, say, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird or Ernest J. Gaines’s A Lesson Before Dying, their reading to be accompanied by discussions and other events in the city’s libraries, bookstores, and community centers as a low-cost way to nurture civic pride and community spirit while propagandizing benignly against racism (in the case of the two novels just cited) and offering teenagers a healthy alternative to television and video games. Who could possibly object?
No show of hands necessary: One may fidget at the choice of Harper Lee and Ernest Gaines (serious and competent writers both) instead of, say, Flannery O’Connor and Ralph Ellison, finer literary artists with no less moral passion in the matter of racism. And one fidgets at the idea of any single book—instead of, say, Dr. Eliot’s Five-Foot Shelf of 418 Har
vard Classics, or the 88 distinguished names (who can resist saying “88 key names”?) on the St. John’s College Reading List last time I looked—as a shared frame of reference for dialogue on racism or anything else, including the topic of Shared Frames of Reference. But one has to start somewhere, no? It’s just a question of where—and in raising that question we find ourselves confronting possible reservations about Great Books curricula, which doubtless also go without saying in this venue, especially on this happy occasion, so let’s review a couple of them anyhow:
NEVER MIND, FOR starters, the half-serious objection of my undergraduate mentor at Johns Hopkins, the late aesthetician and historian of ideas George Boas, who liked to tell us that the problem with the Annapolis curriculum was that it left out not only all the bad books—which, like bad art, may be indispensable to defining and appreciating the good—but also all the arguably great books that happen to disagree with the ones in the canon. We can dispense with these teasing objections because (in the first instance) mediocre-to-bad books and art are sufficiently inescapable that we needn’t include them in our curriculum, although it’s certainly useful to point them out from time to time and to argue with them. As for the second instance, any respectable clutch of Great Books will contain sufficient contradiction or at least disagreement on, e.g., the nature of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty to escape the curricular sins of pasteurization and homogenization. The real problem, it goes without saying (and this is what Professor Boas was good-humoredly pointing out to us sophomores), is that there are so many great or at least important books that no four-year undergraduate survey—much less his own two-year survey—can be more than a radically selective, though not arbitrary, sampling. And this, mind you, was the 1940s and ’50s, before multiculturalism and political correctness hit the fan. Dr. Eliot’s aforementioned shelf (which I myself read, or at least thumbed right through in numerical sequence, while working as a night-shift timekeeper in Baltimore’s Chevrolet assembly plant one undergraduate summer) had come to look quaint indeed by the century’s latter decades: all those Protestant sermons, instead of the Mahabharata and Gargantua and Pantagruel! Alessandro Manzoni’s novel I Promessi Sposi instead of Murasaki Shikibu’s Tale of Genji and James Joyce’s Ulysses! For all its merits, by the 1960s it was as obviously dated a cultural artifact as its most judiciously updated and multiculturally sophisticated present-day counterpart would doubtless be seen to be half a century from now.